In Search of the Viking Type: The Nexus of Racial and Historical Thought in the Nordic Countries to 1920

As the use of racial and ethnic categories in national historiographies gained in popularity in the course of the nineteenth century, stereotypical conceptions of “the North” and Nordic culture morphed from literary tropes and metaphors into racial essentialism. In the present article, this development is charted from its prehistory in early modern Swedish Gothicism, through Gerhard Schøning’s Norwegian adaptation of this ethnocentric paradigm, to Rudolf Keyser’s nineteenth-century “theory of immigration” and its influence on ethnological research in Norway. Whereas racial mixing was generally described in negative terms, Icelandic nationalists began praising their ethnic hybridity primarily in order to distinguish themselves from the Norwegians. Departing from the concept of a constellation of concentric circles of cultural appropriation—in which exclusion is always directed outward—this article demonstrates that the level of cultural inclusivity of these circles determines the extent to which emphasis was laid on ethnic differences between the Nordic countries.